Three years, eight months. That’s how old my son is. To the day, actually. That’s also how long we’ve been dealing with a kid who just will not sleep.
I haven’t posted too much about sleep issues here, but if you go back through my Facebook timeline to 2008/09 you’ll find that the vast majority of my status updates are about our sleep battles.
I’m sure there are kids who are worse. And I know there are parents who deal with much harder things. But oh my god the sleep. It’s tiring. (Pun intended.)
We have had very short – VERY short – stretches where he’ll sleep through the night a few nights in a row. I can’t remember what the record was, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t take two hands to count out the streak. We had some rough nights when we first moved into this house, which we expected, but we’ve now been here, and pretty settled, for 2 1/2 months. Guess how many times he’s slept through the night since we’ve been here. Go on, guess.
ONE.
That’s not counting the nights he slept with us or the ones where one of us, or my mom, slept with him. My husband and I still basically alternate nights so only one of us has to get up on any given night. Which works all right, except for those nights when he gets up 4,326 times.
Okay, to be fair, he’s not that bad.
I’d say he’s up an average of twice a night. Many nights only once, but quite often three or four times. The good thing is that it’s much, much easier to get him back to sleep now. Lately he will just quietly walk into our room and stand next to the bed. That’s generally enough for one of us to wake up, and when we do he says he wants a cuddle. So one of us will go back with him and give him a cuddle because (a) cuddles are nice, even (usually) at 3 a.m. and (b) we’re just too tired to be tough and make him go back to bed on his own.
We’re doing this to ourselves, aren’t we? We know we are, and I think we’ve essentially decided we don’t care. I remember when Connor was really young a fellow new mom observed that all those things we do in the moment to deal with a baby when we’re really tired totally screw us over, but we don’t care. It’s like we’re choosing the way present “me” wants to do things and saying, “Screw you, future me. I’m tired.”
And then you become future me and you wish formerly present me wasn’t such a bitch.
But, alas, here I am nearly four years later still making choices that screw over future me. And not only does future me have to deal with the waking up and the interrupted sleep and the way-too-early mornings, but she has to do it while she’s tired. And there’s no version of me who does well when she’s tired.
I’ve long stopped thinking he’ll finally just sleep already. I’m sure he won’t, ever. I’m sure somewhere out there is a very small girl who may one day become his wife and who will be mad at me for screwing her over too. And all I will be able to say is, “I used to be a much nicer person and a much better mother but your dear husband never slept enough and as a result I’m kind of a bitch.”
So to her, and to all the future versions of me, I say: “Yeah, sorry about that.”
Oh look, he did sleep once. We even got it on camera.
